I got home early today. A client of mine passed away and so my day was cut short. I get online and go to Instapundit , and this is what I see:

REPUBLICANS ARE SAGGING IN THE POLLS: Maybe, in part, it's because Harry Reid is doing better than Bill Frist in fighting pork?

Here's the kind of response that's getting from former GOP supporters: "Okay, real conservatives, Republicans, and libertarians, stay home. Just...stay home in 2006. Or - what the hell - vote for a Democrat. We have to wake up the Stupid Party, before it completely merges itself into the Republicrat Statist Party."

I think that a GOP disaster is now officially looming.

So, it seems that pouting is the way to get what you want in politics.

Yesterday I checked out Glenn's and he was talking down ethanol, said it depleted the soil, as if that corn was not going to be planted any way. I am not saying that ethanol can ever take the place of oil but it seems that every little bit helps. However, when it comes to something that might help farmers libertarians turn into environmentalists.

And today we hear the argument about how irrelevant gas prices are, but hey...look out because the public is going to stay home out of outrage over pork.

What??? How far removed from average Americans do you have to be to realize that people are more concerned about gas prices than they are about Trent Lott's railroad? I mean really. If these people stay home and hand the government over to the Democrats in the middle of a war because of pork then to hell with them.

Disaster looming indeed.

It seems to me that there are a lot of big time bloggers out there that are becoming every bit as arrogant, egotistical, self involved,and self serving as the media they swore they would counter act.

So now after praddling along after Chucky Schumer when he savaged Dubai Ports and the Bush Administration over selling our ports to Muslims we see high profile conservative pundits and bloggers getting all pissy because the Bush administration is [gasp] sounding like Schumer and calling for an investigation of gas prices.

I have no desire to see Exxon nationalized but when I hear from a true blue Republican Hoosier that there is something obscene about the Exxon CEO getting a bonus that comes to about $190,000 a day for everyday he had the job...well, people are wondering if something is amiss.

Between hysterical bloggers bringing back the good old days of the Red Scare comparing undocumented workers to serial killers and libertarians calling for Democratic victory to punish the Republicans who fail to do their bidding I am wondering if some folks in blogland are suffering from hubris.

It also seems to me they have completely forgotten the war. It is as if a bridge in Alaska or some other silly earmark is more important than the fact that CIA agents with ties to the Democratic party are deliberately breaking the rules, if not the laws, and divulging classified information to reporters.

But no matter, Bush wants a guest worker program which means surrender to the wetback invasion and Republicans have not eviscerated domestic spending so what the hell, let's go over to the other side just to punish the GOP. That'll teach them that when we say jump all the hell we want out of them is how high.

Just who do these people think they are? And you know what? My guess is that Trent Lott will win reelection as long as he wants the office, because the people voting for him are not from Tennessee, they are from Mississippi and they just might want that damn railroad.

Maybe Truman was right. After being savaged in the press and pronounced dead in politics he said we should create a new department. The Department of Columnists..to run the country since they think they do anyway. Add bloggers to that list.

UPDATE: AJ has a slightly different view of recent polls than those referenced above:

While the liberal media spins some new polls to paint a bleak picture for reps, the actual numbers show America is sick of them all, left and right. Buried at the end of this fantasy piece is the bottom line:

Americans take dim views of both parties, giving Democrats a positive rating of just 33% and Republicans 35%.

So, the only thing I can tell Dems looking for a silver lining is they are worse than or as bad as the Reps! Don’t expect this to turn into a electorial sweep to the dems this fall.

18
comments:

The sorts of people who would punish their daughter for dating a young boy they don't like by selling her to a pimp.

Hand the keys to house to Burglars, LLC 'cause the wife is eating too many bonbons and ain't vacuuming enough.

You RINOs haven't kicked the spending habit, didn't put 500,000 troops in Iraq to kick in every door and double-tap anyone who so much as sneered at them, haven't nuked Iran yet, and haven't beamed out the 10 million illegal aliens so we're gonna stay home on election day and hand the country back to the seditionists. That'll larn ya. And then when we're done with our infantile hissey fit, say 8 or so years down the road, and everything is far worse than today, we'll toss yer asses out again for not solving those problems with the blink of an eye and the wave of a wand.

Reynold's is neither a conservative (not even a faux conservative) nor is he a Republican. He can amuse himself with his Porkbuster toy as he wishes - certainly Perot did.

There's a simple solution to this, Terrye, he's a non-click away from being a matter of no concern. The coming election will not be about spending. Not with the governments total tax take at around 19.5%, if it were above 21% the Porkbusters would have a shot but it's heading down, not up.

I don't expect the issues to firm up until just before summer recess (July 31). "Til then we're still in the blather stage and those empty pages still need to be filled.

Today I was talking to a client of mine, a nice young man with big problems. He tends to be conservative in his politics and is very religious. I like him a lot, he said that he thought a lot of folks out there think they are the "base" and they are not.

I wonder about it too. It is not as is Bush ever promised mass deportation. It is not as if these same people did not support the war and it is not as Bush was ever famous for being a fiscal conservative.

Why do all these people have a hair up their rear ends all of a sudden?

I agree with Rick. Glenn is neither a conservative nor a Republican. You've got to get out of the habit of thinking of all these people as the same. I personally value Rick's insights into politics far higher than Glenn's. Glenn is an academic for God's sake he doesn't get it. Rick is a Republican, but he's an honest one who understands deeply what people vote about and why.

The question is why we read Glenn. Mostly, it's not for his opinions, but for his ability to digest large amounts of information from the best blogs and therefore to give us a very quick view of the daily zeitgeist. Like the NYT, he imagines that because he has a lot of readers that means that he has a lot of people who care about his opinions. There's some truth in that in both cases, but not nearly as much as both parties would like to believe.

Personally I haven't read Glenn much (or Roger either) for the last year or so. Once you've figured out what their positions are on all the issues, it becomes boring--just more of the same. The true value-added in blogging occurs not in more opinions--we all know what opinions are like, because everybody has one=--but in value-added projects which can't be found elsewhere. Two excellent examples of this are the piece you did about your father yesterday and Rick's ongoing series of analyses of Senate races.

Re: Reynolds... I still click there frequently. I've never gone there with any particular idea that I was interested in his opinion. He doesn't actually express one for most of his stuff. I go there because he points to a lot of stuff I find interesting. He's not a bad internet era link catalog, I suppose.

It seems a lot of blogs have picked some topic that they've decided to beat to death and dig their heels in about. Andrew Sulivan led that charge. He went so far over the edge about gay marriage that I just couldn't be bothered reading it anymore.

Polipundit is similar with the immigration issue. That's one I still can't stop fighting 'cause I have this deep fear that the idiots in congress might actually try to give the shriekers what they are demanding. But I'm near the end of my rope beating my head against the wall with that one.

Reynold's has his Pork Busters jihad.

If I'm inclined to give them some benefit of doubt I presume they are trying to demonstrate that this new media can weild some political power similarly to the way the legacy media does. When I'm at my curmudgeonly worst I just figure they're like some teenagers who just immerse themselves in one silly thing like a favorite band or mode of dress to the point where they define the world around them in the narrowest possible terms.

Whichever it is I wish they'd try to reach for something else. My big hope for the "blogosphere" or the "new media" is not that everyone gets their pet peeve to dig their heels in about but, rather, that more people get exposed to a wide enough range of information to start leaving their pet platitudinal solutions and shallow understandings in the junk drawer. That ain't happening at the moment though, is it.

People don't seem interested in finding ways to move in the direction of better. They seem to want to point at some imaginary place nobody has ever seen that they claim is just over the horizon, declare that to be perfection, and then trumpet that anybody who doesn't think we can, or even should, be there by lunchtime is an enemy.

Let's see, he reads Bill Quick and declares disaster for the Republicans. Oh, brother. How many readers does Bill Quick have? Simple math oughta lend a clue here. Haven't we heard this tune before? Glenn does an excellent job promoting the blogosphere, but sometimes he believes his own hype a bit too much.

After rotating off my favorites bar to my plain-old political links list, I finally dropped Glenno's dubya-dubya-dubya down the pixel chute today. I just couldn't take his neither-of-the-above sanctimony anymore. And I really couldn't care less about singularity or nanobots or Mazdas or Coolpixes either.

I find Jeff Goldstein's serious posts some of the best conservative writing on the net today. His unserious posts are another matter--as are his commenters.

Well if you look at the poll that has got the blogs buzzing it has the following choices as things you most want to see Congress deal with: Immigration 32% [woo hoo] Congress giving money to projects designed to help only a few people 39%. Pensions and Taxes were only about 9% or 10%.

Since I'm not a Republican, it doesn't particularly exercise me much whether they control or don't control Congress. I don't believe all the hype I hear about the Democrats being the party of the end of the world as we know it. I imagine that if they take one or another house back, then what will happen is what almost always happnes: they will tack to the center (whereever that is), much as Bush has moved to expand welfare programs in various ways.

Sitting in your ivory tower office on a college campus thinking of how you think the world should be ordered and actually crafting a proverbial sausage that 300m people have to agree to eat are two entirely different activities.

That update led me to the poll itself. AJ could have gone a lot further than he did in talking about a buried lede. The poll is an over 18 (and it's 1.5% overweight to women, to boot). I use a rule of thumb of 5% subtracted from the Dem side for such a sample to arrive at an approximation of a likely voter poll.

The Dems are in hotter water than I had anticipated based on that - a 6-8% negative spread to the Reps. It takes a 3% shift in a 5% district to move a seat. AJ made a nice catch there.

My only serious observation for now and probably until at least the end of September is to keep an eye on the Democrats in Ohio and the Republicans in Maryland. Otherwise, read for smiles. Bloggers don't descend into madness. Hope this isn't news—that's where they start.

If I thought most of the Democrats were like Evan Bayh I would not be that bothered either. But there is something decidedly shady about some of those folks and I wonder sometimes if it is about covering their asses. defence.

In other words, I think that some folks in the CIA screwed up badly and they know it and they are trying to cover their asses by going after Bush and there are Democrats associated with the Clinton years who put those screwups in those jobs.

I really did not think that it was that big a deal until the leaks started happening with such frequency and the threats to impeach Bush made me believe that there is a good reason not to let Democrats get control while Bush is still in office.

The Republican Party has some serious problems. But if the Party can bring the War on Terror back to the front burner as the election rolls around it may hold power. But the problems are deep and will eventually unravel the GOP majority.

All you have to do is look at how a supposed conservative magazine markets itself to today's "conservative" https://members.humaneventsonline.com/order.php?offer=438

Conservatism isn't about limited government anymore...it's about religion.